Author's response

Gladstone. Heroic Minister,
1865-1898

Eugenio
F. Biagini

Robinson College, Cambridge

I
must begin by acknowledging Dr. Biaginis kind words about Gladstone:
Heroic Minister, 1865-1898. I am very ready to accept the justice
of his verdict that it is a great achievement, a work of magisterial
scholarship, extremely rich in detail and based on magisterial command
of the archival material. I am gratified that he makes no complaint
about what other reviewers have described, puzzlingly, as my impenetrable
prose. On rereading I am always impressed by its limpid clarity.
And it is always agreeable to be assured that one's book is already
a classic; though I must express reservations about his assertion
that it is a classic of Tory historiography. This, I would plead,
is a non sequitur. Dr. Biagini suggests that my study of Gladstone
is perhaps comparable to Morleys. This I interpret as in its way
a great compliment. But he finds some of my arguments less than
convincing. Does it follow then that Dr. Biagini finds Morleys comments
rather more convincing? He never, I think, quite says so. This is
more than a mere debating point. For it is certainly true that if
there is a partisan thrust to my interpretation of Gladstone it
is decidedly a thrust against John Morley's monumental marble and
bronze classic of Liberal piety, presenting Gladstone as a wonderful
pilgrim questing his way from Tory benightedness to Liberal enlightenment
with the latter word being accorded its full secular resonance.
But whether that, in itself, makes my reading Tory is quite another
matter.

Dr. Biagini is offended
by what he defines as an anti-Gladstone thrust lurking in my pages.
He even envisages their being perused approvingly by the shades
of Queen Victoria and Lord Hartington. Well, conceivably. As George
Orwell had to remind his more obsessed comrades, some things are
true even if they are printed in the Daily Telegraph. But
only some things. Leaving aside hypothetical conjectures, however
enlivening, Dr. Biagini is a stern enough taker to task. He alleges
that I ridicule Gladstones Irish land policy. He finds it offensive
that I mock Gladstone by describing the election crash of 1886 as
a grotesque parody of the great triumph of the people that Gladstone
expected the result to be. This sort of thing comes, I suspect,
from starting from a position of exaggerated deference to Gladstones
historical and cultural folk-hero reputation. What pervades Dr.
Biaginis critique, I think I detect, is a tone of high indignation
that Gladstone should be put to the historical question. There is
here an implicit presumption that the Grand Old Man, that Very Good
Thing of the textbooks, lover of the people and beloved by them,
should remain immune from the inescapable rudeness of candid inquiry
and forthright scrutiny. Gladstone himself, it must be said, very
honourably and deliberately, repudiated any such immunity. His journals,
as M. R. D. Foot pointed out, bear the character of Gladstones witnessing
against himself; the self criticisms of morbid astringency form
a series of notes for the prosecution. And, above all, as I put
it in the preface to the first volume of my biography, those journals
record intimate revelations of the utmost importance for an understanding
of Gladstones interior life, and need accordingly to be used with
care and discretion.

Yet they have to be used,
all the same. They exert an incomparable explanatory power. To Dr.
Biagini my mode of candid enquiry generates a discomforting suspicion
that Shannon is trying to trivialise his topic. What Shannon is
simply trying to do is to treat his subject without fear or favour.
Gladstone is not a sacred idol, to be approached with awe. He was
undoubtedly a very great man; but he was also a composite of many
human frailties, not excluding vanity, ambition, aggressiveness,
jealousy and delusions about divine inspiration. And I think there
is no doubt that the agonies of Northern Ireland since the 1970s
have aided immensely in the consolidation and sanctification of
that presumption as to Gladstones privileged immunity. If only he
had been listened to in 1886!

Further: Dr. Biagini deplores
my want of sympathy for Gladstone in certain important respects
for example, Gladstones providentialism in politics. This want of
sympathy, he alleges, leads to a failure to understand. This seems
to me to another instance of non sequitur. I hold that it is quite
possible to understand the prepossessions of a biographical subject
without necessarily in any degree being sympathetic to them. One
can sympathise, as I do, with Gladstone in all kinds of respects.
His narratives were generally admirable. His high-mindedness did
exist and did count. But it is consequences that matter. To cite
one example of Dr. Biaginis method: I quote from Gladstones journal
in 1888 which I instance as a curious vision of Gladstones sheer
cosmic faith in the reality of his assignment to the cause of Irish
Home Rule. Dr. Biagini misses the point entirely. He reduces the
case to one merely exposing my lack of sympathy with and therefore
failure to understand Christian providentialism, of my incomprehension
of Christian spirituality, a spirituality which the former British
prime minister would have shared with any non-conformist pastor
in the country, or indeed with the humblest Primitive Methodist
who ever attended chapel. But that is not at all the point I was
making. The point I was making was Gladstones conviction of his
personal assignment by the Most High as His instrument for His purpose
in this case, giving back to the Irish a parliament in Dublin. That
this, in the matter of motives and intentions, was a good and necessary
thing to be trying to do I make no doubt. But equally, in the matter
of consequences, I draw attention to the tragic likelihood that
it was precisely the manner of Gladstones fixation on his divine
assignment which explains why he was not listened to in 1886.

This brings me to the gravamen
of my objections to Dr. Biaginis critique. My big idea about Gladstone
is that (as I put it in the beginning of this volume) it was his
unswerving conviction, whether as young Evangelical or mature High
Churchman, of the manifest providential government of the world,
and his growing sense of his own assigned role as an instrument,
however unworthy of God Almighty. It was this Christian providentialism
which was, primarily and ultimately, most significant in explaining
the contours and courses of Gladstones life. And within the frame
of the big idea is my account, as I have above sketched out of hours
after having voted in the confidence division for Derby and Disraeli,
is of course to be found in the first volume of this biography.
But I retrieve the essence of the matter in the prologue to the
present volume. The reader will quickly be made aware of my admiration
for what I interpret as the shrewd insights of such as Walter Bagehot
and Goldwin Smith about the adaptive character of Gladstones Liberalism,
as he slipped across the divide between being a Conservative with
dim prospects to being a liberal with bright prospects. Even more
am I impressed by Gladstones own statements on the issue of his
being a member of a Liberal government and being in association
with the Liberal Party, but having never deviated from those truly
Conservative principles with which he first entered public life.
And most of all am I impressed with what I believe to be the most
pregnant statement Gladstone ever made about his sense of the general
shape of politics: his prophecy to Aberdeen in 1856 that the politics
of the future would consist in the doings and intentions of the
minister and the corresponding conviction wrought by them upon the
public mind. It is my contention that for the remainder of his long
career Gladstone never deviated from that basic proposition. It
was a proposition not only of a Peelite, but it was a proposition
also of Gladstonian high politics. It was to be never in fact a
case of the Peoples William; it was always to be a case of Williams
People.

Obviously, a Peelite thesis
so defined must be very near the centre of my reading of Gladstone.
What he learned from his great master Peel was the potency and privilege
of executive government against parliament; and within that frame
of the instrumental role of party as the leverage of heroic politics.
Peelism was the executive muscle of Gladstone's levering. He took
Peels cue that the people could be relied upon to naturalise the
mischievous tendencies of parliament. As a Liberal, Gladstone was
complex, idiosyncratic, and highly problematical. His conventional
fame as a populist is really wide of the mark. Dr. Biagini chides
me for neglecting his popular appeal. I am not sure that I do more
of that later but perhaps I might suggest to Dr. Biagini that he
is asking the wrong question. The right question, in my view, is
how did Gladstone come to conclude that he spoke for the people,
that he was leader of the nation? The germ of the answer to that
question, I think, lies in Gladstones 1856 prophecy. It was the
prophecy of an authoritarian manipulator.

Gladstone's Peelism thus
contributed immensely in the making of what I have described as
Gladstones imperial style. Dr. Biagini and I are to some extent
at cross-purposes. His Peel and Gladstone's Peel are not at all
the same thing. In the 1850s Gladstone constructed an image of Peel
as the beau idéal of statesmanship in contrast to
the deplorable and deleterious Palmerston, (and his ultimate inheritor,
Disraeli.) That was the Peel that really mattered to Gladstone.
It was as that kind of Peelite that Gladstone summoned the people
to his aid against a refractory House of Commons in 1866. It was
as that kind of Peelite that Gladstone drove Russells government
to destruction over Reform; and then drove his party to near disintegration
over Reform again in 1867. It was as that kind of Peelite that Gladstone
summoned the people to his aid in 1868 and then held parliament
magnificently in awe and terror through 1869 and 1870. It was as
that kind of Peelite that Gladstone then drove his government to
destruction between 1871 and 1874. It was as that kind of Peelite
that Gladstone abdicated in 1875. It was as that kind of Peelite
that Gladstone after 1876 waged war against his party as leader
of the nation. It was as that kind of Peelite that Gladstone, after
once more summoning the people to his aid against parliament in
1880, imposed a victorious grip on his party which was not to loosen
until his colleagues summoned the courage to revolt in the flow
of bibliographical narrative. I would ask Dr. Biagini to take due
note of Gladstones own lament amid the collapse of his expectations
about the war in 1870: Here I am the slave of events. This expresses
accurately the nature of political life as it is lived. The broader
picture advocated by Dr. Biagini can often be a tidying away of
contradictions, loose ends, and the general detritus of muddle and
unlooked for consequences. Dr. Biagini makes heavy weather over
Egypt. He asks: what does "Europe" actually mean in this
context? Well, were he to look attentively to my pages on the subject,
he will see that in certain circumstances Gladstone adopted a tone
of piety (we are discharging single handed our European duty) and
in other circumstances, as seeming master of events, a quite different
tone about Europes obligations in the face of Britains sacrifices
and Britains need to be on its guard against becoming dependent
on the Powers in discharging its Egyptian responsibilities on their
behalf. (Why should we promote the neutralisation of the Suez Canal
if as the chief maritime power we can probably seize it in case
of need?)

Dr. Biagini makes particularly
heavy weather in defending Gladstones occupation of Egypt as an
exercise in financial moralism with abstruse references to Italy
and Greece, but not, oddly, to Mexico. He does not need to convince
me of Gladstones good faith. But he might have had difficulty convincing
those disillusioned liberals of the Midlothian ethos that the whole
affair was not what it looked: a war of bond holders against the
Egyptian peasants. And what does he think of Gladstones notion that
what was needed was to plant solidly western and beneficent institutions
in the soil of a Mohamedan community? In many ways, it seems to
me, Gladstones interlude as High Commissioner in the Ionian Islands
encapsulates as well as anything his urge to hold the world in Peelite
tutelage. Out of that, precisely, came the disaster in South Africa
(which Dr. Biagini does not mention).

On Ireland my sins are those
of commission rather than omission, it seems. I am accused of not
being impressed at all by Gladstones land policy. Since I hold the
view (held at the time by many Liberals, not necessarily followers
of either Mill or Bright) that the better way forward in Irish land
would have been to fund the sale of tendencies to tenants rather
than to prop up the landlords by making them concede tenant right,
I must once more, I suppose, plead guilty. But I do object to being
told that treating Gladstone without fear or favour on this question
somehow constitutes a plot to ridicule him. Morley indeed jokes
that had Gladstone in 1881 declared the Koran or the Nautical
Almanack to be an Irish Land Bill he would have got it through.
Ridicule? What is fascinating to me is that Dr. Biagini quite ignores
what I think to be the most revealing episode in the entire record
of Gladstones involvement with the Irish land question. After 1870
Gladstone blocked all efforts to make the 'Bright clauses in the
1870 Land Act, allowing tenants to purchase their tenancies through
special loan facilities, to become an expanding and effective aspect
of land policy. Many Liberals (and Conservatives too) agitated for
tenant purchase and the creation of a solid owner-occupier Irish
constituency. A parliamentary select committee recommended it. Irish
opinion favoured it. When Gladstone visited Ireland in 1877 his
speech in Dublin included, astonishingly, a statement that while
landlordism was a necessary and beneficial element of English society,
he accepted that that was not at all the case in Ireland. He thereupon
endorsed the tenant purchase policy as going with the grain of Irish
sentiment. He alluded to the success of the purchase scheme and
his Irish Church disestablishment measures. I point out that this
was a quite revolutionary declaration for him to make. And Gladstone
repeated that endorsement in the House of Commons in 1879. He said
these things, it must be ituencies. Tragically, that was not provided
by Gladstone in 1886, Instead, he imperially and instantly polarised
opinion into rigid blocs which remained fatally stuck for generations.
And to all pleas thenceforth for a remodelled, more acceptable Home
Rule Bill, Gladstone returned the bleak response: to propose any
measure, except such as Ireland could approve on the lines already
laid down, would be fatuity as regards myself, and treachery to
the Irish nation.

Dr. Biagini takes it very
much amiss that my sympathies obviously lie with Hartington, as
if, ipso facto, that were inadmissible and even disgraceful.
Well, yes, to some extent they obviously do. One consideration I
had in mind here is that had Gladstone retired in 1885, as he was
widely expected to do, and been succeeded by Hartington (which,
again, is what was widely expected), some measure of comprehensive
Irish self-government would, paradoxically, have had a good chance
of being realised in the 1885 parliament. The fact that Hartington
had been opposed to Home Rule in general and in particular to Gladstones
radical version of it in 1886, need not be taken as the end of the
story. Being a subaltern member of a government and being head of
a government are two quite different things. However, I refrain
from pursuing such counterfactually heavy-handed conceits.

In conclusion I must unpolemically
say how much I enjoyed Dr. Biaginis account of The Economist
issue in April 1992 and associated material about Gladstone as a
prophet for the left and as a model for both modern Liberal Democrats
and New Labour. I am very sorry I missed seeing that Economist
issue (on checking I see that I was abroad at the time), for I have
had occasion to publish critical comment on the way Gladstone has
been converted and, as I think distorted, for contemporary progressive
purposes. But I must also add that if Mr. Blair is indeed tending,
as some people fear, towards taking himself seriously as spokesman
for the people and as leader of the nation, then we could be heading
for rough times.